Once again, “our” government confirms every one of my preconceptions.
The soccer championship distracts the people, so they fail to see what happens in real life. For the government, this is an excellent time to quickly raise the health care insurance premiums we have to pay – regardless of everything they promised us over the last few years.
This happens, although
- we have had a permanent cycle of “health reforms”, the last of which gave us a totally stupid health fonts, political reform successes have been praised to excess,
- including measures like the (probably totally ineffective) compulsory discounts for pharmaceutical products or “stricter” rules for verification of a product’s effectiveness,
- we have had an unprecedented wave of privatisation in the health-care sector the only healing effect of which was in favour of the investors, instead of the patients (see also an article in yesterday’s FAZ about hospitals in Germany).
Let me remind you that all this happened against the background of an excessive discussion about a reduction of the burden on our citizens, among other things by lowering taxes. And now the dues are again increased and labour continues to get more expensive.
What do the people have to say about it?
Nothing!
Nobody gets excited. Why should they? After all, the number of people who are prepared to take responsibility for their own health dwindles. Instead, the opposite happens:
More and more people shun physical exertion like the devil shuns holy water. Many cannot even stand life any more without overheated or air-conditioned rooms. Enjoying the great outdoors has become an unpleasant exception to the rule. Most of us “must” have their heavy “mobile living room” with them at all times, thinking they can not live without it. Endless quantities of warm water are considered a matter of course and the healthy use of cold water for washing your hands is considered outrageous.
The majority of our contemporaries think that moving under your own physical power is no longer up to date. They get more and more obese, consider climbing steps a torture and perspire easily. Instead of exercising their bodies, they perfume them. Deodorants and shampoos, coming in all sorts of plastic containers for the various body parts and applications, have become important parts of hygiene.
To make up for it, everybody eats as much as they can get into their mouths and we consume dependency causing substances in excess.
And then we are surprised if the body no longer works as it should. Then we run to see the doctor with even the smallest pain troubling us. There is not the slightest willingness to change one’s lifestyle. Instead, we take it for granted that high-technology treatment and extremely expensive medicine are used for healing. They are supposed to do the healing miraculously, without our cooperation.
I can imagine quite a few political activities that would make sense. The intent would be to make people aware of self-responsibility as a value of its own. In my opinion, controlling the process through the purse would absolutely be an option.
Yet the politicians hesitate. After all, by now we have come to a state of affairs where not only the senior citizens, but also the obese voters are the majority. And who wants to annoy the majority?
What is more: politicians even cause the opposite effect. They cooperate with lobbyists. The industry tries to torpedo both the non-smoker protection and the ban of night alcohol sales at fuel stations. It prevents a simple marking of unhealthy food by the “traffic light symbols”. Powerful interest groups make it corrupt.
And since nobody is courageous enough to give things their proper names and start a changing process, we will once again all have to pay a little more. It is the hope of those who install the new rule that, because of the soccer world championship, nobody will notice.
Those who earn a lot of money in the process are happy. And as usual, those who would wish to live with responsibility are the stupid ones. This it what Schlaaand, as it is called since Lena sang, is like. What a pity that “Schland” rhymes with “Schand”.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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